The “VIRTUALization REALITY”

With so much buzz around the topic of virtualization these days, it’s tough sometimes to figure out what’s real or not.

Earlier this month, we kicked off an effort to take a closer look at what technology is most popular among SpiceHeads. I thought we’d take a peek at where virtualization fits into the mix. We wanted to know what types of companies are virtualizing – consider it the “Virtualization Reality” according to SpiceHeads. (Picture me wearing Virtual Reality goggles at my desk as I write this post pretending I’m on the beach…)

We examined anonymous and aggregated data from a sample of more than 100,000 companies in Spiceworks of comparable size in over 100 countries.
Interestingly, we found that organizations in certain industries were more likely to have virtualization products installed than others - software, energy, and engineering companies were nearly twice as likely to have virtualization products installed than organizations in the education, construction, and nonprofit sectors.

Here’s a pretty neat graphic that shows how they compare:

And, for those of you wondering about what products are most-popular – Here’s what we found across Spiceworks:

VMware has 80.1% market share

Microsoft has 15.1% market share

Citrix XenServer has 4.1% market share

Are you currently considering or working with virtualization products? Does this mirror what you’ve experienced in your industry?

We’ll check back to see how this changes over time – We’ll be sure to keep you posted.

I am in the education sector and we just recently within the last few weeks actually installed a virtual server (vmware) and have migrated 5 physical servers over into the one virtual box. I can already see the benefit to having virtualized over physical servers. I don't know why we hadn't done it sooner.

It doesn't surprise me very much with a few exceptions those that infrequently use Virtualization are industries where money is tight and little benefit is seen by those in management. Where as in the top Virtualization industries you see a great need and they tend to be more forward industries as far as tech adoption. Especially software development, can you think of an environment that's more suited for Virtualization than that?